Granted, it's way too easy to dump on Starbucks these days, but I was taken aback when I started to Google the name of the coffee chain's so-called social networking site on Monday and discovered the glee people seemed to take in dumping on MyStarbucksIdea.com.

I'm still mulling a social networking panel I saw last week at Ogilvy's Verge Summit in New York. So, rather than keep mulling it within the limited confines of my brain, I've decided to share what I heard on that panel with the Social Media Insider community -- people who, I've noticed, comment on just about everything, and intelligently, too.

So, as of this morning (Monday) I was going to write this column about the death-by-Twitter of Sarah Lacy's interview with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg over the weekend at SXSW Interactive. But before I can really get into that imbroglio -- I'll get there later in this column -- I'll do a quick drive-by on the Twitterization of Eliot Spitzer....

The real topic of this column is to delve a little more deeply into a headline you may have seen last week: that agencies "don't get it" when it comes to social media, per a study from Cymfony, the TNS Media Intelligence unit dedicated to monitoring and studying the social media scene. There's nothing particularly shocking about that headline, but since it appears days after the Online Publishers Association added Community to its Internet Activity Index, it's obvious this is yet another hot topic that agency people have to get a handle on.

If you read last week's column, you know I decided to come clean and make clear that, as intrigued as I am by social networks and social media, I also have a lot of skepticism about parts of this world. Huge valuations based on nascent business models? I've seen that movie before. What I thought I'd get back by attempting to deflate the hype was a ream of preachy emails complaining about how I didn't get it. Instead, what I got back were emails that read more like confessionals, as many of my new friends admitted that they, too, were …

For reasons that still escape me, I'm Mediapost's new Social Media Insider -- and this is my first column. Of course, I say that tongue (partially) in cheek, because if you go to MySpace or LinkedIn or Plaxo or Facebook, you will find my profile, listed as either Cathy Taylor or Catharine P. Taylor (spell the name right, please!). But all of those profiles don't tell you the role social networks play in my life, which is what I thought I'd devote this first column to.